by Marie Arana
“Watch out for those giants up north, Marisi,” Tío Víctor told me, sweeping me up and letting me kiss his lavender-scented chin. “They’ll step on you, you’re so small.” Cuidado. Te pueden pisar.
Mother bustled about energetically, issuing promises at every turn. We could eat off the floors once we got there, her side of America was so clean. Water would course from the spigots. Milk would not be contaminated. Everything would come tucked in boxes with colorful pictures on top. We could eat berries from bushes. We could swim streams with our mouths open. A germ-free country! With perfect roads and tidy houses, just like the village in Papi’s garage.
I took my last look down Avenida Angamos and saw the uppity ambassador’s son peering out his gate at us. “Will we have swans?” I asked.
“We will,” she confirmed gaily. “Or geese or ducks or pelicans or anything else your little heart desires.”
THERE WERE NO swans at the Dutch Maid Motel on Route 22 in Springfield, New Jersey. The discount emporia rose up beside it like floats in a carnival day parade. MOTHER GOOSE SHOES, said one billboard, and behind it—as though to deliver on an uncle’s warning—a giant’s shoe, big as a building, with smiling gringos streaming through its doors. BIG BOY LUMBER, said another sign, and looming above it, a musclebound Gog in a red plaid shirt with his head shaved clean as a tub.
The Dutch Maid Motel was shell pink with white lace in its windows, a picket fence leading the way. Two yellow-haired dolls in frilled aprons framed the front lawn marquee, cocking their wooden toes and bending over so that their underpants showed. In the back garden, freshly planted shrubs stood at attention, and white lawn chairs waited for swimmers to clamber out of the pool. It was the antithesis of anything we had ever known in Wyoming. We’d never seen a highway so busy, with so many people and such enormous stores. We had never seen such shiny long cars, such a webwork of roads. We looked around for the familiar: open prairie, cattle, horses, and boots. But none of these was in evidence. This America was different.
We had come to New Jersey for the public schools. Not because it would be the most convenient commute for my father. It was not. It took nearly an hour for the hulking Erie-Lackawanna to cart a clamoring army of worsted wool to the Hudson River every weekday morning. Nor were we there, as far as we could tell, because of my mother. She didn’t have a relative within a five-state radius.
“Because of the public schools?” said Papi, scratching his head with wonder. To him, the notion of building a life around children was alien, bizarre, inexplicable. In Peru, it had been the other way around: children built lives around their parents. The elders defined the world.
While Papi traveled to Hoboken on the lurching, squealing Erie-Lackawanna, then ferried across the Hudson to Fulton Street, snapping a newspaper as smartly as any itinerant company man, Mother sallied forth with school ratings and a real-estate map in hand.
George and I headed for the Dutch Maid’s lobby, where we’d discovered how well we were going to fare in these United States. “See that?” I said to George, pointing a finger at Lucy and Desi in the lobby’s box. “She’s the wife, and her husband speaks Spanish. Their family’s just like us!” “See that?” said my brother, as Hoss Cartwright swung a leg over a horse. “He’s a guy with a ranch, just like Grandpa. This place is gonna be great!” Only Vicki reserved opinion, peering at us from a far corner, seeing that those lambent shadows bore no resemblance to the trawl of highway outside.
“Ey! Mangia, mangia!” crowed an Italian waitress with high hair in the Howard Johnson across the road from the lumber giant. Her lips were beige patent, her eyes winged like Nefertiti’s, her black hairdo leaning like a tower about to crash. “You people paesan’? You just get hee or what?”
“No, no,” said Papi, flashing a smile and flirting. “That’s Spanish you’re hearing.”
“Zat right?” She stared at us for a while, cracking her gum, thinking it over. “Don’t hee mucha that around hee. I don’t speak Italian myself, but for a minute, you sounded like paesan’.” She walked away, keeling against the cant of her hair, wiping her hands on her hips.
I was living on strawberry milk shakes. Was there a nectar so silky, so sweet on the tongue, so satisfying to the eye in its prettily tapered glass? Afternoons would come and Mother would bring hot dogs and french fries wrapped in wax paper, with mustard and relish on the side. George tore in happily. He was pudgy now, constantly eating. The yellow pills he’d been taking ever since Boston had made him jolly and fat. He polished off his frankfurters, praising their tidy ingenuity, but I could hardly take more than a bite. It would take time before I could eat from cardboard, sitting on the edge of a bed, with paper spread out on my knees. I longed for fragrant sopa de albahaca from my abuelita’s table, with her well-ironed napkins and oversize spoons. As it was, I consumed very little in that wholesale paradise. I sat in the pink motel, awaited my fluted shakes, checked on Desi’s progress in his wife’s country, listened to the thrum of the road, and read neon messages that squiggled from the giant’s chest like fortunes down a bruja’s braid. Shop here, America. We build you.
NOT PARAMONGA, NOT Cartavio, not Rawlins could have prepared me for Summit, New Jersey. Mother chose it for the excellence of its schools, but she might as well have chosen it for its polarity to everything we’d known. Moving from Lima to Summit was like wandering into Belgrade from Bombay, the differences were so marked.
It was a small-town suburb of New York City, bedroom community for company presidents and businessmen. Split between Anglos and Italians, the residents were largely prosperous, but there was a hierarchy to that prosperity I was slow to see. The rich were the commuters, WASPs who had graduated from the Ivy League, played golf at the Beacon Hill Country Club, shopped at Brooks Brothers, and sent their children to prep schools nearby: Pingry, Lawrenceville, Kent Place. The less rich were the Italians—merchants, landscapers, restaurateurs, mechanics—who serviced the town. There was another notable category: scientists who worked in nearby Bell Labs or Ciba-Geigy, and their brainy, musical children. But there were no indigents: no beggars in the streets, no señoras hawking fruit.
Ours was the only Hispanic family. There were few Jews. The relative sizes of the town’s churches told the story. Summit Presbyterian was the largest, most prestigious. That imposing stone structure sat squarely in the middle of town, and the rich could be seen strutting in and out of it in their finery. The Catholic Church of St. Theresa, with steps sweeping up to its portals as if they led to salvation itself, was situated several blocks away, next to its own school. The Episcopal, Methodist, and Baptist churches were scattered about town, signaling lesser lights.
By June we were in Troy Court, a cluster of brick apartment buildings on New England Avenue. It was a modest district, on the other side of town from the mansions, and it would have been clear to anyone but us children that it was home to people on the fringes of society. There were strings of apartments up and down the avenue, where transients came and went, and old ramshackle houses, where nurses and waitresses lived.
Mother had her eye on a house in the middle range of the Summit spectrum, but it would be months before the owners vacated it. She had decided we would be wise to wait. When we moved into the apartment, it was empty save for an upright piano, the one thing we had bought on Route 22. We took our meals on it, plinking while we chewed, sleeping on the floor, waiting for our crate to arrive.
Within a week, we had recreated Lima on New England Avenue—huacos on the shelves, llama skins draped through the rooms. The display looked odd, even to us. The Lima we had come from had been a jumble, a place where Spanish and indigenous objects mixed freely—where modern and ancient accompanied each other, where a rich man’s house might be flanked by a tenement—but here, in this quiet, suburban setting, our possessions looked out of place. When the truck finally pulled away, two neighbors came over to see.
They were ten and eight, as sunny and frisky as Dutch maids on a roadside billboard. “
You new?” said the older one. “We’re new. We just moved in a few days ago.”
They were from Westfield, a few towns over. George and I told them we were from Peru, but they puckered their mouths, rolled their eyes, and allowed as how they didn’t know where that was.
“Your parents are Westfieldian people?” I asked, trying to make conversation, figuring Westfield to be a country, like Peru.
“Were,” the tall one said. “Our mother got married last week.”
I was taking that information in, but she sailed ahead breezily. “My name is Suzi Hess. This is my sister, Sara. My mother used to be called Hess, too. Like us. But she’s Mrs. Loeb now.”
There it was. The gringo roulette.
“Oh, I know all about that,” I said, flaunting my urbanity. “My mother has a different name, too.”
“Different from you?”
“No.” I rushed to explain. “But different from her parents.”
“Well, of course, silly. Every married woman has a different name from her parents.”
My head felt fat as a blowfish. I needed to say that in Peru women strung their married and maiden names together, and that when my mother did that, her maiden name had turned out to be married, too, but it was going to take so much explanation. It was more complicated than I was willing to say: I was ashamed of my mother; ashamed that she was ashamed. In Peru, divorce was unthinkable. These girls, on the other hand, spoke of it so freely. I wanted them to be my friends. I burbled, dithered, stared down my nose, pulled on my ear. It didn’t take long for Suzi to take pity. “Okay, let’s see now. Your mother is divorced like ours, right?” she said, trying to help me along.
“Unh, yeah,” I said, and my head filled with the miracle that we might have this great flaw in common.
“So she has children by another marriage?” she said.
“Unh, yeah. I dunno.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know whether or not you have sisters or brothers somewhere else?”
“I dunno,” I repeated.
“You mean they could be walking around and you wouldn’t have any idea they’re there?”
I hadn’t thought of that. Now I genuinely tried to squeeze that possibility into my brain. “No idea,” I responded.
“Jee-zee-kew-zee. They do things crazy in Pay-roo,” Suzi said. She laughed merrily, a tinkly, high titter as sweet as a canary’s. Freckly Sara flashed her big, buck teeth and put out a hand. “Friends?”
“Yip. Sure.”
While George and I were running up and down the driveway behind those apartments, working to seal a friendship with these girls, Mother was humming through our rooms, settling into the life she had dreamed of for so long. She’d whisk outside from time to time, smoothing her hair, trotting to a cab, pointing to our big sister’s face in the window. “You mind Vicki, you hear?” When we asked where she was going, she’d reply, “To Summit Food Market!” Or “Off to your school!” Or “Off to see about the house!” Off!
She seemed enraptured with her new life, was a bundle of energy. I watched her cook meals, wash dishes, scrub floors—do tasks I had never seen her do before—but she dug in with relish, singing as she went, looking up joyfully when I walked in, pushing the hair from her eyes.
If it had never been clear before, it was crystal clear now: My mother had been a sad woman in Peru. There was nothing sad about her now. It didn’t seem to matter that she wasn’t with the Clapps. She did not visit them, nor did she call or write them, as far as I knew. She didn’t seem to need them at all. It began to dawn on me that it wasn’t them she had missed in Peru; she’d missed these American streets and her freedom to roam around in them.
Papi was another story: He dragged out to the train station earlier and earlier in the morning, shuffled home beat at the end of the day. He grew more and more disengaged. He missed his Peruvian family and his compadres. You could see it in the way he slumped through the door, headed for his chair, heaved himself down with a sigh. “Write to your abuelita,” he’d tell me day after day, pointing to the stack of letters from her. “She wants to know how you are.”
In town, he had trouble understanding the fast-talking, slang-slinging suburbanites; he’d cast a weary look my way to signal me to translate. At first, I was as puzzled by accents as he was. But his reliance on me made an impression. In Peru I had always thought he and I were similar, that Mother was the different one. But here in Summit, I felt more kinship with my mother, my father the odd one out. “You kids are turning into gringos,” he’d say, staring at us in amazement. But I knew our mother was the only gringo among us; she was it a full hundred percent. My father was the only Peruvian; he, too, was one hundred percent. They were wholes. They were complete. They were who they were. They would never become anything like the other. We children, on the other hand, were becoming others all the time, shuttling back and forth. We were the fifty-fifties. We were the cobbled ones.
SUMMIT WAS NOTHING like Mother, really, nor was it anything like the American school in Lima, nor like Rawlins, Wyoming, whose lingo we heard in our dreams. At first, we swaggered around, George and I, like cowboys, a-yawin’ and a-struttin’, thinking we knew what America was. But when Easterners looked at us, they drew their chins into their necks, pocketed their hands, and sidled away. We trotted down Springfield Avenue, hiking our jeans, jiggling our heels, only to find that the places that drew these gringos were Roots haberdashery and Summit Athletic. Not bars with decapitated fauna. Not general stores with buckshot and beans. There were men in hats, plenty of them, but they were scurrying out of the Summit train station with their faces pulled down and their collars pulled up, repairing to Brookdale Liquors, then tearing home with their wives behind the wheel. On weekends, a different breed swept down Main Street: in pastel cardigans, with bags of charcoal briquets, golf clubs, and Roots merchandise dangling from their hands, pennies winking out of their shoes.
It was the way they spoke that was most puzzling. Why didn’t it sound like English we’d heard before? It certainly didn’t sound like Nub, or Grandpa Doc, or Old Joe Krozier. “Ah’ll take a pack uh this here Juicy Fruit, mister,” I drawled to Summit’s version of a corner-store Wong, a scrubbed little man in a white jacket and spectacles behind the counter at Liss Pharmacy.
“Beg your pardon, miss?”
I cleared my throat and tried again, raising my voice this time. “This here Jee-you-see Fah-root, mister. How much yew want?”
“Oh, ho! No need to shout, my dear. That’ll cost you … a nickel.”
“Nekel? Qué quiere decir nekel?” I whispered to George.
“That big moneda there,” he hissed, pointing into my palm. “The five-cent one.”
“Oh.” I surrendered it to the man. He pursed his lips.
“Y’ever chaw weed?” I asked Suzi, sitting on the stair step of our apartment, looking out at the pristine grass where children were not to go.
“Chaw weed?”
“Yip. My cousin Nub, he’s a cowboy, and he larned me how.”
“Taught me how.”
“O-keh, o-keh. Taught me how. Have you ever done it?”
“No, I haven’t. Gee, Marie, you gotta stop talking weird. You say things all wrong. And I don’t know why. I hear your mother talking just like everybody else. If you don’t talk right you’ll never fit in school. Kids are gonna make fun of you, for sure.”
Suzi and Sara became our tutors, whiling away summer days until fireflies bumped our faces, teaching us what to say. You said okay, not o-keh. You went to a movie, not a cinema. You caught colds, not constipations. You wrote on a clean, spanking new sheet of paper. Not a fresh shit. It was clear we had entered a new phase, far from our dirt-lot hankerings on Avenida Angamos. We weren’t hoping to be thought of as better. We just hoped we wouldn’t be made “fun of.” We hoped not to be noticed at all.
BRAYTON WAS A school fit for giants. Its bricks rose high as the Rawlins Penitentiary’s that first Monday in September when Mother shooed us up t
he concrete stairs into the principal’s office. He was bending over the windowsill, clanking metal with a ruler, talking to himself.
“Mr. Nelson?” my mother ventured.
The man whirled around with his ruler in the air. He was large, bald, like the lumbergog at Big Boy, with a face as bright as a toy’s. “Come in! Come in! Day one, and this thingamajig’s giving me trouble. Whew! Hot in here, don’t you think?”
“What is it?” I whispered to George.
“Heater,” he whispered back. “For when it gets cold.” I studied the iron serpent. I’d never seen anything quite like it before.
This world is filled with all manner of signs, Antonio once taught me. If we only have the wisdom to see them. The ruler on the radiator was one. I was going to be colder than I’d ever thought possible, an arctic wind piercing my bones. I’d freeze by the time I had a best friend, before my teacher thought to look at me, before I’d counted forty days at my desk. Fall rolled in like a torrent, tempering leaves with frost. Freezing them hard so that branches disowned them and they clicked to earth one by one. George and I scampered down Tulip Street like two caracaras in an ice storm, shivering and chattering all the way to Mr. Nelson’s overworked coils.
There were no other Latinos at school. Nor were there any as far as we could see in the whole of that leafless town in the fall of ‘59. Vicki was the junior-high Hispanic. The only face like mine in the elementary school’s corridors was my brother’s round, sunny one.
My first best friend was Kit, a pale, black-Irish beauty, wan as the tragic heroine that hung on my grandmother’s wall. She was big-brained and cameo-delicate. Musical. Wicked. And she shared my passion for a scare.
